Monday, 15 December 2014

Torture has its apologists. A US Senate committee released a report about CIA interrogation methods following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon exposing and condemning the CIA's use of torture to get information from enemy (Al Qaeda) combatants.

Its opponents have condemned the Senate report as misleading, inaccurate, and wrong. Blogger Patterico provides a summary of their objections:

Three former CIA directors — George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — as well as three Deputy CIA Directors, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to dispute the Democrat-penned torture report released yesterday:

What is wrong with the committee’s report?
First, its claim that the CIA’s interrogation program was ineffective
in producing intelligence that helped us disrupt, capture, or kill
terrorists is just not accurate. The program was invaluable in three
critical ways:
• It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, thereby removing them from the battlefield.
• It led to the disruption of terrorist plots and prevented mass casualty attacks, saving American and Allied lives.
• It added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an
organization and therefore informed our approaches on how best to
attack, thwart and degrade it.

The Senate report claimed that the information gained under duress was of little worth, implying that if torture were useful in providing vital information it would somehow have been acceptable. The supporters of the programme point out, on the contrary, how successful it was in providing information to combat the Islamist terrorists.

Both the detractors and supporters of torture are operating out of a profoundly degenerate moral abyss. The ethics on display are utilitarian: if a particular strategy or technique works it is condoned, even commended. If it does not, then torture is immoral. In other words, the end justifies the means to achieve it. Anything which works in winning the fight is justifiable and moral. At this point there is no ideological or philosophical distinction between the United States and Communist regimes; or between the United States and ISIS. There is no just war here--only winning at any cost.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz is reminding Americans that no civilized nation should ever torture prisoners. “Torture is wrong, unambiguously. Period. The end. Civilized nations do
not engage in torture and Congress has rightly acted to make absolutely
clear that the United States will not engage in torture,” Cruz said
during the Q-and-A portion of a speech at the Heritage Foundation. BreitbartNews

Thank God that some still believe in an absolute standard of right and wrong, and an eternal law to which all men and nations are bound and to which they will be held to account. Otherwise we might come to believe that dropping two atomic bombs upon helpless non-combatant men, women, and children in Japan was a righteous thing to do. After all, it worked.